I’m so excited for Christmas, and in our home, Christmas is all about the food.
For many Christmas, food is all about gorging out on surgery laden sweets, masses of meat and heavily processed snacks. But when you are focused on healing from a chronic illness and generally in the business of promoting natural health and wellbeing, Christmas food can bring so much internal conflict.
I struggled with this conflict for a few years at the start of my healing journey. every year I would tell myself I would just eat all the Christmassy ‘treats’, relax my restorative practices and get back on track afterwards. but then i would find myself having a Christmas exhausted, stressed, sick, and battling all my symptoms that had faded. The joy of Christmas was being sucked away, I began to realise being physically and mentally present was more important over Christmas than temporary sugar highs.
After accepting my healing practices had to continue no matter the season, I started to plan how I could give them that festive twist to spark the seasonal joy, that I so desperately craved. I practiced yoga my candle light, took frosty walks in nature, focused my journaling on winter and family themes, spent mindful time making presents and filled my baths and massage oils with winter spices. But making healthy food feel christmassy felt like the ultimate challenge, it felt like such a big part of our Christmas and held most of my positive festive memories.
I decided to take inspiration from traditional festive flavours and build from there. We are talking, roasted nuts, cranberries, black forest (cherries and chocolate), ginger, peppermint, mulled spices, winter veggies, thyme and rosemary.
I tested and experimented with several recipes over the years, some utter failures….. but many have become yearly staples in our home, allowing us to go through the Christmas season feeling healthy and energised, and avoiding the stress of flaring symptoms.
This year I have finally decided to share some of our favourite Christmas recipes with you all, but to make sure you have plenty of time to gather your ingredients and plan out when to make them I am going to be releasing them starting 1st December 2021, over 12 days, as 12 days of Christmas!
To make sure you are one of the first to see each recipe make sure you are subscribed to the Restorative Wellbeing mailing list!
(Links to each recipes will appear here as they are released!)